A month of logging leaves me three-tenths of a pound down — and climbing.

Four weeks in, the trend reads 169.1 lb. That is still 0.3 lb below the 169.4 I started at, but the direction has turned: the trend gained 0.5 lb this week, which hands back most of the 0.8 lb I was down at the end of week three and flattens the monthly rate from −0.31 to −0.04 lb/week. The chart shows why — the back half of the week is a run of heavy prints, 169.9 on the 25th, 170.4 on the 26th, a 171.4 to close out the 31st, exactly the kind of cluster that pulls an EWMA up and holds it there. Intake averaged 2,200 kcal/day, the highest of the four weeks and a clean 200 over the 2,000 target. So the weight should have gone up, and it did — no contradiction to explain away this time.

There are three honest reasons a month of logging has netted only three-tenths of a pound, and only one of them is mine to fix. My TDEE estimate may be too high, so that 2,000 is barely a deficit and 2,200 is none at all; my logged intake may be undercounting, since a tap-per-meal log trades precision for frequency by design; or I was simply over the target, every week, this one by the widest margin yet. I cannot measure my true maintenance from a bathroom scale in four weeks, and I will not make the log more precise without turning notch into the app I built it to avoid — but I can stop treating 2,000 as a suggestion.

So next week the method changes in the one place it can: I hold every day under 2,000. An estimate I am not hitting tells me nothing about whether the estimate was right, so close that gap first. If the trend turns down on a real deficit, the target was fine and the problem was adherence; if it still does not move, the TDEE number is too generous and I lower it.